For the first 20 years on our organizational trail, our
Executive Director, Sharone Lee, completed a long course of study in
support of our Autism mission goals. When her family first founded this
organization, she provided the benefits of hundreds of hours of training
in human relations, parenting, and best developmental Autism practices.
That work and her innovative design of thematic Autism educational
materials arose from her B.F.A. in Visual Communication Design and
well-served the visual thinking preschoolers at our Step Up™
Foundational Program and young students at Open Door™ School
Cooperative. We then shared those goods in local provider workshops and
with other PNW region organizations (1992-1997). Building on those
mission outcomes and fieldwork, she then completed a Post-Bach B.S. in
Developmental Research Psychology with a focus on the vocational
training of and best organizational niches for people with Autism
(1997-1999). Altogether, that work generated the launch of Our Windows
of Opportunity™ vocational and recreational skills training program for
our teen alum with more severe Autism who needed alternatives to or
augmentation of public school placements. (1998) Again, we shared our best
developmental Autism practices model approach with hundreds of adult
service providers to our local community of life-long institutionalized
adults as they were being transitioned back into community (1999-2003).
In this way, just one volunteer's critical course of studies was shared
with a thousand plus colleagues on the ground, who then served the larger Autism community across the PNW. This meant that Sharone built others' career
paths by sacrificing her own to her volunteer commitment to make this progress possible. This is often a necessary sacrifice of women in
volunteer service to those in loss and poverty.

Along the way,
Sharone had experienced and witnessed the dire struggles of mothers
at-risk due to Autism and other profound loss impacts on our families.
So, she went on to complete an M.A. in Human Development with a
specialization on Leadership in Parent Education and a thesis on models
of biosocial justice work through adaptive parenting education for all
of us who must live, work, survive, and cope with the mutual impacts of
Autism (1998-2003). Her own healing on this journey spread to her
professional colleagues and parent peers open to models of deeper
process work. That course of study yielded new family development
resources and participatory Autism research opportunities for our parent
peer mentoring cohort that ran for 15 years, until our last alum kids
became adults. (2000-2015). This group met our charitable mission
commitment to all our children and their families to walk with them as
long as they needed or wanted our alum community support. (Our last
student alum aged out in March of 2017 and his/her mother then joined
our next generation volunteer ranks as our Oregon Alum Connect making
this year a sad and sweet arrival at our quarter century "mission
achieved" finished line, just when we were all truly ready to move on to
new mission challenges.)

The possibly even greater value of that
family fieldwork effort was that Sharone was able to translate what we were learning together into a much needed comprehensive online resource. This work
led Sharone to finish her Ph.D. in Human and Organizational Development
with a focus on dimensional information systems of knowledge
organizations that serve communities in loss. Her goal was to develop ways to more authentically
include the realities of the Autism community in public discourse (2003-2013). Her applied
research in information systems let us attempt new and greater global
outreach through our comprehensive dimensional map in an Autism
information website that was posted at this URL from 2005 to 2015. It
answered questions gathered from ten years of providing a live 24/7
support line globally and local trainings and support groups. However,
by 2015, better and worse changes in answers to that huge information
base, other organizations and nations appreciating and appropriating on
our work, the explosion of social media, and most of all the end of use
permissions from key Autism training institutions that were terminated
for all their previous training graduates, required that we take that
web site down permanently. At this point in 2018, after our moves being
completed in 2016 and 2017, our future mission vision has shifted to
ways to develop a more radical alternative online information resource
access for Autism professionals and parent home program providers in a
way that could transcend, by mapping, informational barriers and
openings that we are still witnessing and encountering.

Through
these ways of providing alternative options to Oregon's Autism community
locally and then sharing those resources globally online, Sharone's
studies were pursued as
part of her volunteer service to our organization. Through that mission
work, families in
financial need and their providers in difficult binds were granted
access to optimum programs,
services, training, and consultation resources at no or lower cost
from 1992 to 2017. Through Dr. Lee's academic pursuits past she has
mapped out her life spanning volunteer commitment to our organizational
mission path to come. Her wish is to have a life well-lived in service
to others, just as her family had envisioned at the time of our
founding. Now, the sum of Sharone's studies and fieldwork will continue
to
support our future global mission goals online as she designs and
relaunch
a new website that links into the launch of our Understanding Autism social media campaign.

Yet,
just as we hoped to celebrate her important academic milestone of
becoming Dr. Sharone Lee in 2013, Sharone and most of our Understanding
Autism Organization community began to experience the combination of
other profound life losses that must fall upon our survivorship of the
mutual impacts of Autism. At that point, we all worked together to adapt
to the stress of dealing with multiples, illnesses, deaths of beloved
friends and family, and other big life event impacts like natural
disasters, job instability, denial of healthcare access, and divorce. In
this way, we were all empathically reminded of the sober importance of
our mission to cooperatively work to help those of us in profound loss
find ways to be safer and freer from risks of harm. Gratefully, all of
our long term organizational experts and a number of new highly skilled
professionals joined in our all volunteer efforts so that we could
continue on with that, our mission vision. We thank you all for all that
you have given to our mission work past, present and future. Your
dedication and support has helped us meet many of our our ten year goals
timely, including successfully expanding our operations into Washington
state by the early spring of 2016 and to find new offices for our
online work with technical training peers in Portland, Oregon in 2017
just as our old site was sold. This was truly a miracle to behold--but
we did it.

One small unexpected mission light, in the depths of
the dark of new loss, appeared when Sharone tragically lost five beloved
members in the midst of her launching our move into Washington. Quite
suddenly and late one night in June of 2014, she inherited an aging and
ill service dog "Buddy" who was now homeless and so, would most likely
be put down if she could not take him in immediately. When she saw "Call
Sharone" scrawled across an unpaid vet bill in the handwriting of a
most beloved Gramma now gone, she was all in. Since this rescue service
dog owner role was far beyond her current resources as an Autism mission
volunteer moving her home and offices across two states in new loss and
at-risk, we all embraced Buddy as our organizational mascot in loss
too. Dear Buddy, a lovely 7 year old cockapoo, began to recover his
health and showed remarkable capacities working in service to our alum
with Autism and our parents and volunteers in loss. So, because everyone
on our team needed to work to support our mission, we gave Buddy a job
as emotional support dog to parent volunteers and mobility dog in
community training to alum with Autism. He picked up the role and ran
with his new job of co-researcher figuring out with us how
cognitive-developmental dog training methods (that Sharone and her now
grown son with more severe Autism had been studying together so that he
might earn a dog after working as a volunteer helper on the move) might
mesh with the cognitive developmental models of Autism program design
that we use to help our adult volunteers with Autism work at our site
and on the move--literally. Buddy and "his boy" thrived together
in our travels across Oregon and Washington. In the process of learning
how to manage this unexpected model program research challenge, Sharone
designed and field-tested new Autism service dog team training apparatus
and methods that we will be posting with that story on our new facebook
site as an open source resource for our community at large and with a
fund-raising link so you all might be able help us with Buddy's many
medical and care costs by helping us feed two birds with one hand
again--with some left over for a small and very special dog with a big
heart that turned out to need special vet care for his remaining years.

By
the end of our
25th Anniversary in 2017, Sharone had relocated our main online mission
activities
from our model site in Salem to offices in Portland, Oregon and
relocated our model site development project to
the Bellingham, Washington area--hoping to meet our final ten year
mission
goals asap. While she encountered very significant obstacles and
truly sorrow-full disappointments along our way of pursuing those
outcomes, our organizational family of volunteers has helped her reach 2018 all
together ready, able and willing to
complete our 2010 ten-year plan by 2020--all of us saddened and much wiser.